PandaPassport.com – China Blog

I touched on this once before, hence the “revisited.” And here’s an update of sorts.

Plan A

Here’s a neat new plugin which, though apparently designed for providing dictionary definitions, can be used as a neat way to footnote all the non-English words in your blog posts. For anyone in the China blogosphere who enters any great amount of Chinese words in your text, this may be a cool method to list definitions at the end of your posts.

From Web tools Collection:

WP-Definitions is an easy way to bring clarity to your blog by adding double square brackets around any word like this: [[word]]. The definition of that word will then be included at the bottom of your post and the word itself will become a named anchor linking to the definition.

Plan B

If that plugin doesn’t meet your needs, you might try this one which (as I said) I previously wrote about:

How to Annotate Chinese Characters with Pinyin Tone Markers

Though I spoke of it in a China-specific context, it could be applied to any second language words – Japanese, Spanish, French, what have you… Or essentially any situation where you want to annotate a certain word or phrase. Just hover your mouse over the word, and you get your annotation pop-up.

Anyone who’s familiar with Chinese websites – especially Chinese chat forums (BBSs) – will know all about those crazy little animated emoticons. Yeah sure, you’ve seen emoticons in your MSN messenger before, but Chinese emoticons are especially messed up.

So messed up in fact, that I decided I just had to install this plugin:

CoolCode.cn Emoticons Plugin from Xenium and Andot.

Download Plugin directly (Zip)

Note: Normally I wouldn’t link directly to a file on someone else’s server, but as it’s hosted on a Chinese webpage, it might be impossible to find otherwise. Hope that’s ok guys.

Here’s a preview of the emoticons listed:

Installation:

• Upload the Emoticons folder to your plugins directory.
• Find this code:
  

• And just above that, insert this:
  if (class_exists('emotions')) {
emotions::bar();
}
?>
• Go to plugin management page in Wordpress, and click Activate Plugin

Issues:

For all the emoticons to display properly (all 60+ of them!) you need a fairly wide text column. Or else it might push your sidebar to the bottom, as it did with mine.

One workaround for narrow text areas:

I just chose the best 15 emoticons, and deleted the rest from the images folder included in the emoticon plugin directory. Maybe 60 is a bit much anyway… In any case, they now display sans probleme on just above my comments box (see below).

Good stuff.

UPDATED WORKAROUND: Reader Evitc provided this solution of modifying the CSS in the comments.

I’ve been running this one on my much neglected Chinese blog for months now, but I hadn’t bothered to install it over here.

I think it looks good. And they’re kinda fun too. Click the Comments link to test it out.

Incidentally, my WordPress theme, Hoofei, was created by a Chinese developer as well. Good to see China representin’ (far) East side when it comes to WordPress!

Has anyone else spent any time venturing into the wacky world of Chinese web development?

I just came across a somewhat unorthodox way to get around China’s Great Firewall.

If you’re apprehensive about the governement censors picking up on any of your sensitive content, you might want to consider using this wordpress plugin to set up a sort of Super Silent Stealth Ninja Blog:

Text to Image Plugin for Wordpress

What this plugin does is converts the text that you write on your blog into an image (png file), which obviously cannot be read by Chinese increasingly robot censors. So if you were to write about the forbidden 3 Ts (and no I don’t mean that chick with the 3 titties in Total Recall) or F@lun G0ng, you’d be safe from at least a part of China’s Net Nanny.

Drawbacks:

• China does still have human censors, and they just might find you.
• Your readers may have difficulty finding you via search engines, because just like the Chinese censors, google relies heavily on text-reading robots too. But if you’re confident the content is good, readers will most certainly come to you.

This is an interesting blog tweak for sure.

If anyone decides to test it out, be sure to let me know.

(h/t to Weblog Tools Collection)

Found on Techcrunch: This new Stumbleupon plugin seems really cool. It allows you to stumble through one website, and land on random posts, like so.

Download it here

All the same, I thought this plugin could do with some icons. Techcrunch has one, but I thought I’d whip up a few more using Flash. For colors, I thought it would be best to bring in the web 2.0 color template, as those colors all over the place these days. Mouse hover over the icon to see which 2.0 site that particular color comes from, along with it’s hex-code.

Just right click, and SAVE AS to download your favorite:

…or download the whole pack as a zip file

When you’ve chosen the one you’d like to use, you can upload that pic to your UPLOADS folder. Then you can take this code, and slap it on your website to insert your neato Stumble button!

Of course, replace the gif name with the one you’ve chosen.

This post is what happens when I drink too much coffee.

China Stolen-Media-of-the-Day: 24 Season 3

To go along with Season 1 and 2 that I posted a while back, here are the continuing adventures of Jack Bauer in Season 3 of 24. All of this pirated goodness comes from our buddies over at youku, the Chinese youtube knock-off.

Anyone notice that they stream way faster than youtube?

Wow. Like, really really faster.